What do managers know? Wisdom and manager identity in later career
Abstract
In this article we focus on the knowing of experienced middle managers in later career and make a two-fold contribution to management learning research. Firstly, we critically examine the construct of wisdom as a way of deepening understanding of such managers’ knowing and we respond calls to provide empirical evidence of the manifestations of wisdom in contemporary management practice. Secondly, we assess the managers’ engagement with wisdom as a resource for identity-work. Management is increasingly conceptualised as an identity project and we examine how managers deployed wisdom as a discursive identity resource. We show how wisdom was used to counter currently favoured normative narratives of evidence based management and the associated subject position of the omniscient and rational, but never quite adequate, manager. We reveal how narratives of wisdom were drawn upon in constructing distinctive, valued and preferred managerial subjectivities sustainable in later career. Finally, we propose implications for management learning and manager education.
Keywords
Wisdom, Identity, Identity-work; Older managers
Introduction
Inquiry into what managers know is of importance for enhancing the understanding and the practice of management learning. The nature of what is known or what is to be known, that is, the nature of the product of learning, influences the type of learning process that is likely to be effective. In this article we make a two-fold contribution to management learning research. Firstly, we critically examine the construct of wisdom as a way of deepening understanding of experienced, later career, managers’ knowing and we respond to the call to provide empirical evidence of the manifestations of wisdom in contemporary management practice (McKenna et al., 2013). Secondly, we assess experienced middle managers’ engagement with wisdom as a resource for identity-work. Management is increasingly conceptualised as an identity project(Warhurst, 2016) and we examine how managers deployed wisdom as a discursive identity resource. We show how wisdom was used to counter currently favoured normative narratives of evidence-based management and the associated subject position of the omniscient and rational, but never quite adequate, manager. We reveal how narratives of wisdom were drawn upon in constructing more distinctive, valued and preferred manager subjectivities that were sustainable in later career.
On the basis of the steady growth of academic management research, evidence-based-management has come to be widely advocated (Rousseau, 2006; Morrell and Learmonth, 2015). In turn, the ‘conventional wisdom’ of management and other forms of managerial knowing are denigrated in the light of the ‘hard facts’ generated by the management research (Pfeffer and Sutton: 2006: 13). Fuelled on hard facts, manager education, such as MBA provision, has become the largest area of in-service education for universities (Hay, 2014). However, Rennstam and Ashcraft (2013: 11) note an increase in ‘knowledge scepticism’ and critiques of the contributions of formal knowledge and the associated emphasis on technical rationality, inmanagement practice are long-standing (see Eraut, 1994; Gherardi, 2000; Laine, et al., 2016). For example, Lave (1997) notes that formal knowledge amounted to knowledge of practice rather than knowledge for practice. Gosling and Mintzberg’s (2006: 419) widely cited critique of management education similarly draws attention to much formal management knowledge amounting to ‘abstractions and generalisations out of context’ that had ‘little practical utility’. It is argued that managers are thus left ill equipped to deal with the now prevalent ‘uncertain, challenging and ever unfolding situations’ (Mackay et al., 2014: 425).
Such observations do not imply that less knowledge is needed but, rather, that more than knowledge is needed in managers’ practice (McKenna and Rooney, 2009). Certain scholars have come to argue that wisdom is that more, representing a different kind of knowing for managers, enabling them to question assumptions and to do things differently (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 2011). These arguments have been strengthened in recent years by publications examining the wisdom for management within eastern philosophies and within religions and spiritual systems (see for example, Muyzenberg, 2014). Thus ‘wisdom has begun to enjoy a revival as a subject of scholarly concern’ (Nonakaet al., 2014: 367) and a literature has emerged that examines the practical wisdom of management (Prusak, 2013). Managers themselves are captivated by the potential of wisdom. For instance, perennially the most popular self-help text with managers, Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, explicitly grounds its prescriptions for the good life and good leadership upon tenants of wisdom derived from the Christianity. Our findings show that later career managers’ accounts of their practice were typically narrated to highlightthe wisdom of their actions. In our quest to understand this phenomenon we turned to the notion of identity.
Post-structuralist, social constructionist theorisations of identity are gaining traction for understanding manager behaviour and learning (Hay, 2014; Warhurst, 2016). Such theorisationsadopt anti-essentialist positions, regarding identity not as ascribed but, rather, as requiring ‘constant and relentless achievement’through contested negotiations with others (Knights and Clarke, 2014: 335). Reedy (2008: 67) notes that by contrast to well-established professions, managers ‘struggle to find a secure identity’ from their work. The formal knowledge base of management is readily accessible and constantly evolving. Managers are thereby exposed to challenge from reporting staff, directors and diverse external stakeholders who all believe that they know better and readily blame managers for organisational underperformance. Middle managers who are in the later stages of their careers are likely to suffer further ontological insecurity. The advance of equalities legislation has abolished statutory retirement ages. However, it has been found that managers aged in their 50s firstly, conceive themselves as being in a final phase of their working lives and secondly, experience anxiety from younger, invariably degree qualified, managers progressing careers and overtaking them in seniority (Warhurst and Black, 2015). As Jammaerset al. (2016) find in the case of discourses of disability, so too with discourses of age, for all but the most senior managers such discourses typically provide only negative symbolic representations. Such representations are of decline and departure and construct marginalised and subordinate, less valued, occupational subject positions (Fleischmann et al., 2015). Achieving and sustaining a positive and preferred identity involves identity-work to resistsuch discourses and their associated subject positions (Laineet al., 2016) and to engage with other, more supportive, discourses.
Our key contention in this article is that later career middle managers strive to overcome the ontological insecurities arising from the dominating, disciplining discourse of formal management knowledge through engaging with alternative, more exclusive and personal, discourses of knowing. Such managers, as we will show, might choose to make-sense of themselves to themselves and to others, through appropriating the discursive resource of wisdom. A subordinated middle manager might thus, through conversational-action, re-author herself using narratives of wisdom in accounting for her practice. The manager might thereby establish an alternative, preferred, prestige and more readily defendable sense of occupational self in later career. Thus, the research question addressed in this article is to examine how experienced managers deploy narratives of wisdom in maintaining a preferred and positive sense-of-self in later career.
The article is structured as follows. Firstly, the meaning of wisdom in the context of management is analysed to establish an outline framework of manager-wisdom. Secondly, the social-constructionist conceptualisation of identity is elaborated in understanding the use of wisdom as a discursive resource for identity construction. Thirdly, the empirical methodology used in eliciting accounts of managers’ practice is examined. Fourthly, the findings of the empirical study are analysed to show the deployment of wisdom narratives in experienced managers’ identity-work. Theoretical conclusions are then drawn providing new insights into what managers know and why. Finally, the implications of these conclusions for managerial learning are considered.
Understanding wisdom and identity in management
Defining wisdom remains a key and continually captivating activity in its study such that Kessler and Bailey (2007: xviii) note, ‘wisdom is among the most profound and complex concepts in our vernacular’ and concluded that, ‘there are as many dictionary definitions of wisdom as there are dictionaries’. This complexity can be explained in a number of ways. Firstly, the meaning space of wisdom is evolving such that wisdom means different things to different people in different places at different times (Trowbridge, 2005). Secondly, diverse disciplinary lenses have been used to examine wisdom (Prusak, 2013). Thirdly, the study of wisdom has been entwined for millennia with religious and spiritual thinking and with faith (Lenssen, Cornuel and Kakabadse, 2014). Even restricting the examination of wisdom to the domain of management, promptsNonakaet al. (2014: 375) to reflect on ‘wrestling with the elusiveness of wisdom’. The preferred definition within this article builds from the position that wisdom should be understood as a process rather than a tangible, measurable, product. That is, wisdom is understood as know-how rather than know-that (Maxwell, 2013) or as ‘something that people do rather than something that people have’ (Rennstam and Ashcraft, 2013: 3). Therefore, while wisdom can be construed as requiring the accumulation of a breadth and depth of knowledge, it is best understood as a quality or capability withknowledge. Wisdom involves the judicious selection and sensitive application or adaptation of knowledge (McKenna and Rooney, 2007).
The following account, written to encapsulate the essence of what wisdom might mean in management, was prompted by the experiences of our respondent Rob. Rob had commented in her interview with us on advice she had received from a Buddhist monk about what she described as the madness of management in an area of the organisation for which she had just been given responsibility, an area she referred to as the asylum. The account (figure one) holistically synthesises themes from the secular cannon of Western thinking about wisdom, drawing largely from Aristotle’s seminal Nicomachean Ethics and upon his notion of phronesis or practical wisdom.
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A number of structural typologies of wisdom have been proposed (see Sternberg, 2005). From these typologies five distinct commonly identified attributes can be discerned. We have labelled these attributes as follows: values informed practice; intuition and judgment; broader perspectives giving a bigger picture; meta-understanding - living with uncertainty and learning from life; socially and contextually informed action.
As noted, the significance of wisdom for managers can be usefully understood through the lens of identity. Reflecting the individualisation thesis (Reedy et al., 2016), traditional notions of identity as ascribed and fixed have been overshadowed in recent years by understandings of selfhood as requiring ‘constant and relentless achievement’ (Knights and Clarke, 2014: 337). Subject positions are achieved through stories about the self,told as soliloquies or in interaction with others (Brown and Coupland, 2015: 2). Language is thus taken not as representative but as constitutive of self-hood and identities are constructed through the use of discursive practices (Bell and King, 2010). Discursive practices, involving, for example, the use of a distinctive style of language associated with a profession, are woven into stories, or narratives. Therefore, anindividual’s identity is found in conversational action, that is, in the reflexive capacity to ‘keep a particular narrative going’ (Giddens, 1991: 54; see also, Brown and Coupland; Reedy, 2008).
Achieved identities are insecure and fragile being subject to diverse threats and assaults (Collinson, 2003; Knights and Clarke, 2014; Thornborrow and Brown, 2009). Firstly, identities are explicitly threatened by the judgments of others (Brown and Coupland, 2015). Identities are inevitably disciplined and distorted by power relations (Brown and Lewis, 2011) and managers’ identities are particularly precarious being vulnerable to constant hierarchical surveillance and performance judgements. Secondly, identities are pervasively and perniciously threatened in more implicit ways through the imposition or unwary assimilation of sanctioned, idealised, discourses. Laineet al. (2016), drawing upon a Foucauldian understanding of discourse and power, note how organisational discoursestypically serve to constitutesubordinated subjectivities. Whereas an authentically honest managerial self might be characterised by uncertainty and anxiety (Hay, 2014), pervasive cultural scripts in organisations such as success, achievement and progress (Knights and Clarke, 2015) prompt managers in particular to adopt inauthentic subjectivities (Reedy, 2009).
To mitigate or counter ontological discomfort and to sustain a positive, coherent sense-of-self requires a process of identity-work (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). Older middle managers might particularly need to engage with this process. The managerial role is unlikely to be as strong a source of identity for those in the middle compared to those in either junior orsenior managerial roles. Moreover, agein employment is typically associated with decline and detrimental subjectivities (Warhurst and Black, 2015). As organisations draw upon the ever-increasing supply of graduates, middle managers aged in their 50shave a keen sense of being readily replaceable commodities (Warhurst and Black, 2015).
While, identities are, as noted, framed within relations of power (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002), elite workers undoubtedly have some agency to author preferred selves through their identity-work (Warhurst, 2011). Various typologies of identity-work strategies are proposed (McInnes and Corlett, 2012) and certain of these strategies have traction for understanding managers’ claims to wisdom. Thus, identity-work is undertaken as a strategy to resist imposed subject positions (Collinson, 2003) and to create preferred, aspired or elite subjectivities (Thornborrow and Brown, 2009). This latter identity-work strategy involves individuals striving to achieve the promise of a self that is ‘higher, better, nobler’ and more authentic than their current way of being (Thornborrow and Brown, 2009: 362).
A preferred identity can be effectively secured by acquiring scarce symbolic or discursive resources (Knight and Clarke, 2014). We argue that claims to wisdom provide middle managers with just such a scarce resource that can be employed opportunistically in compensating for identity threats. Engaging with wisdom provides a means for maintaining a distinct, positive and elite, or at least, exclusive, identity narrative in later career.
Research methodology
The empirical findings that follow derive from an in-depth study of the accounts of managerial work provided by experienced middle managers over the age of 50. A broadly narrative inquiry approach was adopted whereby stories were elicited. That ‘people seek to accomplish things when they talk or when they write’ (Bryman and Bell, 2007: 536), so the analysis focused on interpreting the meaning of narratives within participants’ stories, that is, the analysis focussed on why what was said was said.
A purposive approach to sampling was adopted. Subsequent to institutional ethical approval, participants were recruited from among experienced middle manager graduates of a university’s executive MBA programme. Graduates were purposively sought from this group who met the criteria of having ten or more years of management experience and who were over the age of 50. Of the total of sixty-two graduates approached, twenty-two agreed to participate in the study and a full dataset was collected from nineteen. All participants had responsibilities for the delivery of products or services within budget, for non-routine operational matters and also for strategy formulation and business development. Slightly more than half were employed by public sector / not-for-profit organizations and slightly less than half were women.
Visual elicitation techniques were used to enable participants to express themselves beyond words and to facilitate deeper reflection and richer narratives (Black and Warhurst, 2015: 108). Participants were requested to produce three visuals to explain what you do and how you are as a manager. The visuals requested were: a time-line depicting career trajectories over the past five years; a social-network diagram of interactions in work; an image or montage of images depicting managerial self-perceptions. In-depth interviews then followed with the participants being asked to discuss their visuals. Detailed stories were engendered obviating the need for the prepared interview schedule and a data corpus of over 250,000 words was transcribed.
Within these stories, we analysed participants’ discursive practices. Narratives of wisdom were discerned from our initial readings and searching for such narratives was not pre-determined. Our subsequent engagement with the managerial wisdom literature sensitised us to distinct types of wisdom narrative and informed the second round of analysis. The decision to then focus on the uses of such narratives as a resource for identity-work was taken during our further analysis of the data as we recognised how identity theorising could unlock the underlying meaning of the narratives. To ensure that these analytical processes were rigorous the two researchers independently undertook multiple readings of the transcripts and sought to arrive at a consensus regarding both the derivation of codes and the application of codes to the managers’ accounts.
In particular, it is acknowledged that identities are a ‘discursive accomplishment, co-constructed with the researcher in interview settings’ (Toyoki and Brown, 2014: 720). Participants are likely to provide the sort of account that it is thought either the researcher wants to hear or that will enable the participant to be seen in a good light. Therefore, researcher reflexivity was important as both of the researchers were known to the participants as tutors on the MBA degree which all had completed. This influence is discussed where relevant in what follows. Moreover, researchers inevitably study phenomena of personal interest and the first author of this research is himself a later career (academic) manager. Reflexive dialogue between the researchers (Corlett, 2013) resulted in a circumspect account of age at work.
Attributes of wisdom in managers’ accounts of practice
The findings that now follow take the form of vignettes. The vignettes arecompiled from five managers’ accounts of particular episodes in their managerial practicebutexemplify narrative themes widely evident in all managers’ accounts. These five managers were, of course, all aged over 50 and all had more than ten years of management experience. All were in larger organisations, in middle management roles reporting directly to directors or chief executives and held both strategic planning and delivery responsibilities. Jim worked for a petrochemical company, Martin for a distribution company, Di for a city council’s adult social-care division, Tom for a housing association and Denise for a health-care insurance company. While the managers’ vignettes serve to illustrate the meaning of wisdom in contemporary management, the vignettes are particularly revelatory about the uses of wisdom as an identity resource in later career.